CarPlay in iOS 26 adds five new ways to customize your setup

CarPlay has gotten a lot of new features in iOS 26, but Apple also now lets you customize your in-car setup more than ever with new settings. Here are five ways iOS 26 lets you customize CarPlay.

#1: Smart Display Zoom

Smart Display Zoom is a unique new feature that’s meant to better optimize your CarPlay setup for the size and shape of your in-car display.

Inside CarPlay’s Settings app ⇾ Display you’ll find the new Smart Display Zoom toggle, which is off by default.

Note: Apple says the setting isn’t available on every single car. But it should be present on most.

If you want to get an idea of how Smart Display Zoom might look, check out our full gallery here.

#2: Customize widgets

Widgets have been around on iPhone for years, but iOS 26 finally brought them to CarPlay.

Widgets live to the left of your CarPlay Home Screen, and depending on your screen size, you’ll see anywhere from 1 to 3 widget stacks at a time.

To customize the widgets in each stack, go to Settings on your iPhone, then General ⇾ CarPlay ⇾ Your Car ⇾ Widgets. Apple lets you add and remove widgets, with a max of five in each stack. You can also choose whether they use Smart Rotate or not.

#3: New wallpapers

iOS 26 adds brand new wallpapers to CarPlay to make the interface feel fresh.

There are six different color options to choose from, all variants of the new default iPhone wallpaper.

Each wallpaper dynamically changes depending on if you’re using light mode or dark mode.

You can change your CarPlay wallpaper from the in-car Settings app ⇾ Wallpaper.

#4: Resize text

The iPhone has long offered Accessibility settings to control text size across iOS. But for the first time, iOS 26 enables similar text resizing in CarPlay.

To resize the text size systemwide across CarPlay, follow three easy steps:

1. Open the Settings app
2. Tap Accessibility, then Text Size
3. Tap a text size, and CarPlay will show a preview of the size below each number

5: Change app icon appearance

Similar to how you can customize the look of app icons on your iPhone’s Home Screen, CarPlay now lets you change icon appearance too.

Inside CarPlay’s Settings app, you can choose whether app icons have a Default, Dark, or Clear appearance. These can be customized for whether you’re in light mode or dark mode.

The clear appearance brings a more transparent Liquid Glass look to your CarPlay icons.

What are your favorite ways to customize your CarPlay setup? Let us know in the comments.

Best CarPlay accessories

• In-car charger with 2 USB-C and 2 USB-A ports
• MagSafe Car Mount for iPhone
• 10-foot iPhone cable USB-C to USB-A
• AirTag 2 for tracking your car (1-pack / 4-pack)